The Horse Road (2 page)

Silence filled my ears, and the song of a finch in a birch grove danced inside the silence. The thin mist of dust, kicked up by the horses on the stony path, sifted down to coat the summer grass. Gryphon's breath heaved. He tossed his neck angrily against the pull of my tight reins, and snorted impatiently as we trotted along.

‘Batu!' I yelled. ‘Batu, where are you?'

If only he would answer, I could turn Gryphon's
head again and kick him into a gallop; I knew already how he would leap away, determined and eager to catch up to the other horses, to pass them by, to win. We thought alike, Gryphon and I. At home on our horse farm in the Valley of Ferghana, Gryphon would stand sleepily in his pasture with his eyes half closed, his belly stretched tight with lush alfalfa. And I, in my father's two-storey brick house, bent over my bride-wealth embroidery, was a shy, plump girl who couldn't speak to dinner guests. But out here, in the mountains, when we visited the nomad camp every year, Gryphon and I transformed into wild things, free and fierce and alive. For a short time, I became the daughter that my mother probably wished for. And for a short time, I could forget about the life that waited for me in the city of Ershi, the life where I would be trapped indoors, separated from the horses, doomed to be married to a boy I had met only a few times and was too shy to speak to. My unthinkable future.

Tears prickled in my eyes. Perhaps I was overexcited, or overtired, or simply overcome with the great looming silence of the mountains. I rubbed the tears away impatiently, holding the reins in one hand. Crying was for a city girl, not for a girl whose mother had survived losing her own people, and being sold at auction.
Forget about your city life
, I scolded myself.
Just find Batu!

‘Batu!' I yelled again but only my echo answered,
ringing off the rocky cliffs in the mountains.
Annoying boy
, I thought.
He's probably just playing a trick on me, as usual.

A crow flapped across the treetops, cawing harshly. Gryphon trotted angrily on down the trail, tossing his head and snorting, threatening at any moment to tear around in a circle and run downhill without my permission. I held him straight onwards with my legs, and ignored the agitated swishing of his knotted tail.

‘Batu!' I yelled again. A marmot gave a shrill whistle, peering at me from a rock pile, and holding grass between its front paws. It looked like a little man, sitting up on its furry brown haunches. Then it dived suddenly into the dark mouth of its burrow.

A trickle of apprehension ran down my spine. For the first time, I began to truly believe that something had happened to Batu.

I felt very alone. The silence seemed larger, crouching somewhere near me, ready to pounce. A cold eddy wafted off the mountains and fanned my flushed cheeks, blowing my long black curls. I patted Gryphon's shoulder for comfort, and my hand came away damp with pink sweat. No one knew why the Persian horses sweated blood; it was simply one more thing that made them different from other horses.

The murmur of running water filled the air as we approached the place where the path crossed the mountain stream. Suddenly Gryphon's ears pricked, straining towards some sound that I hadn't heard. He
stopped in the path, snorting, and I laid my hand upon the hilt of my dagger fastened at my waist. Then I heard it too: a thread of sound, a boy whistling. Out from the shadows of the willow trees came Batu, brilliant in an orange tunic held at the waist with a turquoise sash, and trudging steadily beside his limping brown horse.

‘What's happened?' I cried, urging Gryphon into a trot. Reaching Batu, I slid from Gryphon to stand beside him.

‘My poor mare,' he said gloomily. ‘That boy on the sorrel gelding? He knocked into us going down the bank into the water, and my mare stumbled and fell. She's hurt her leg. See?'

I squatted beside him and ran my hand down the mare's left hind leg, feeling the heat and the swelling in the flesh above the fetlock joint.

‘So now we're both riding in dust,' Batu said with a rueful grin. ‘I'm sorry, Kalli. I should have ridden Rain instead.'

‘It doesn't matter,' I replied, trying to feel my friend's worry and even the pain that perhaps throbbed in the mare's leg; trying to ignore the heavy lump of disappointment that filled my stomach. I straightened, stared at the mare's hanging head, and at Gryphon's neck where the sweat was drying and leaving his coat stiff and salty. It wasn't fair! Now Gryphon had lost his chance to win, even though he was the fastest horse I knew! This might be the last
year that I raced. Perhaps at this moon next summer, I would be behind walls in Ershi, smelling mountains far off in the wind like a horse that tries to smell its way to water across a desert.

I kicked at a stone in the track, and fought against the fresh sting in my eyes.

‘Kalli,' Batu said kindly. I glanced up into his dark, angled eyes; the bruise a blue stain like spilled water. His wide brown face, framed by his mane of long hair, was as familiar as my own for I had known him all my life. Now his forehead was wrinkled in a worried frown.

I was suddenly ashamed of being such a child. ‘It's fine,' I reassured him, mustering a smile. ‘I wanted a summer walk. I love dust!'

Batu's face broke into his flashing grin, then suddenly his gaze sharpened on something above me. I swivelled to look upwards. High against the light, a golden eagle soared on the mountain wind. The shadow of its wide wings slid across us and passed on; I glimpsed the cruel curve of its yellow beak, the glint of its eye. It wheeled in against the face of the mountain, and swooped around a pinnacle of grey rock to disappear from view. Batu breathed in sharply, like an excited horse.

‘Maybe there's a nest there!' he cried, the race forgotten. His father was a white bone chief, a fearless hunter who rode a dark horse and carried an eagle on a leather gauntlet upon one arm. Together,
man and eagle hunted for rabbits to cook, or for the foxes that attacked the nomads' herds of sheep. Batu had told me that a trained eagle might even fight the great grey wolves that roamed like vengeful ghosts. The eagle, he said, flew right at their eyes.

‘I must climb up and see if there's a nest!' Batu said. ‘Then I can return here another day and capture an eaglet! It is time, Kalli, for me to train an eagle of my own! Do you want to climb with me?'

I looked where Batu gestured and saw that a narrow ravine led up the side of the mountain to a ridgeline that lay between two peaks. Where the ravine and the ridgeline merged, there was a dip like the curve in a horse's back, the place where you lay a saddle.

‘From there, we might be able to see around the rock outcropping into the nest!' Batu said. ‘Also from that ridge, you can see down into a large valley, where the track from Osh runs out of the mountains into the Ferghana Valley. The merchant caravans travel eastwards on that track towards the great Taklamakan Desert where nothing lives. Come on, Kalli!'

‘We will be late returning to camp!' I protested. ‘My mother might worry.'

‘She is drinking
koumiss
with the other women, and forgetting her troubles,' Batu said, flashing another grin. He caught me by the arm and tugged. ‘Come on! Help me find my eagle!'

Batu's excitement was contagious; suddenly I wanted to see if the eagle had landed on a pile of
sticks larger across than a chariot wheel, and to peer down into a valley where traders passed by with their long strings of donkeys, yaks, horses and two-humped camels.

And if my mother was drinking
koumiss
, the fermented mare's milk, she would be smiling the rare, gracious smile that wiped the queenly sternness from her face.

We unbridled, then hobbled the horses and left them wrenching greedily at tall grasses. Gryphon ate so fast that half-chewed grass fell out of one side of his dark, wrinkled mouth. He was always an eager, impatient animal. I smiled and followed Batu's shoulders up the ravine. Stones clattered beneath my second-best pair of riding boots. Their feet were of red leather, while the tops, rising to my knees, were of yellow leather decorated with appliqués of more red leather cut into the shapes of rams' horns. I admired them as I climbed, bent over, trying to ignore the throb in my leg muscles.

The sun rode higher as we struggled upwards. I thought of my father's Greek god of the sun, Helios, driving westwards in his chariot pulled by horses as golden as Gryphon. Sweat ran down inside the legs of my trousers with their embroidered stripes of brown and red. My embroidered tunic stuck to my back.

At last, we reached the ridgeline, and Batu edged along its sharpness, craning for a view of the eagle. I glanced downwards to where the horses grazed; they
seemed contented in the grass and summer herbs, their backs gleaming. I straightened and looked to the south where the Pamir mountains rose in a vast wall, rumpled between us and the country called India. To the north, further away than I could see, lay the land from which my mother had come, a place of grass and tribes and the mighty Volga River. To the west lay deserts, and trading cities, and the bright Mediterranean Sea, and the land of Greece which my father had left when he was a young man filled with the spirit of adventure. And here I stood now, in the heart of all this world. I smiled to myself, and tipped my face towards the afternoon sun.

Then I inched forward to where the ridgeline fell away in a long drop into a deep valley. My head spun. I lay on my belly and peered over. For a moment, all I saw was miles of shimmering summer air, rocks, trees. Then movement caught my attention. I stared, knuckled my eyes, stared again.

No! It couldn't be!

I froze. Even my breathing became shallow with terror.

‘Batu!' I whispered urgently. ‘Batu, come here!'

Then I stared again, down into that valley where the track from the east trickled over the mountains towards Ferghana, my home and the heart of the world.

Batu dropped down beside me. ‘Who is it?' he whispered harshly.

I scrutinised every detail: the foot soldiers marching doggedly along with light shining on the tips of their spears, the cavalry units on their small horses raising a pall of dust, the donkeys and black yaks and brown camels laden with boxes and bales of supplies, the loaded ox wagons lurching over stones. Above the army fluttered bright red banners made of the cloth called silk, the marvellous cloth that came from far away, in the east, and that my father longed to trade for. But to his frustration, our king in Ershi would not consent to trading agreements with the east; he was said to hate the emperor who ruled that foreign place.

‘It's the Chinese,' I breathed. ‘My father has described them to me. They are sending another army to attack Ershi.'

‘For the horses?' Batu muttered.

‘They want our Persian horses,' I agreed. ‘Don't you remember? Years ago, they sent an ambassador over the roof of the world to ask the king of Ferghana for horses. But the king wouldn't give them any of our horses, and the ambassador and his men were attacked and beheaded.'

‘Then what happened?' Batu asked, swivelling to look at me, his dark eyes serious.

‘Then the Chinese emperor was very angry, and two years ago he sent an army over the mountains, a march of many starving months, but the army was defeated in the land of Osh, high above the valley of
Ferghana. Now, he is sending another army to take our horses!'

Batu let out a long breath. ‘The Middle Kingdom has long been the enemy of my people,' he muttered. ‘The Hsiung-nu tribes have been driven westwards like sheep by its armies. Now the kingdom is building a great stone wall to hold back the nomads.'

‘I have heard this too in the city,' I agreed.

Batu glared at the troops marching far below, massed like ants, pouring out of the mountains, filling the valley, steadily moving westwards towards the safety of Ershi, and my family's farm where our horse herd grazed the alfalfa in the shade of poplar trees.

‘I must ride for my mother!' I cried, and I sprang up and began leaping and sliding down the mountain with Batu at my heels. Gryphon flung up his head, startled, grass trailing from his mouth. My mother would know what to do, I thought; my strong brave mother who had once been a warrior in her own Sarmatian tribe, far to the north. My mother, trainer of horses. She would know how to save us, our mares and foals, our pastures and stables. Gryphon. Me. And most important of all, my white mare, Swan. My most precious white mare.

‘Hurry!' I screamed, fear clawing at my heart. ‘Hurry, Batu! We must save the horses!'

‘I cannot ride this mare hard!' Batu cried as we sprinted across the grass towards the grazing horses. ‘You must ride to camp without me!'

I nodded, reaching into the tree where I had hung Gryphon's bridle. The blue clay beads, woven on to the cheek pieces, glinted as I swung the bridle free and slipped it on to my horse's head. Then I squatted and undid the hobbles of woollen rope from around his fetlocks, my fingers fumbling with haste. ‘Batu,' I called over one shoulder, ‘I hate leaving you alone! Promise you won't climb back up looking for eaglets. You might be attacked by the parent birds!'

‘Forget about eagles! You must ride to warn the warriors!'

I nodded again. I knew that the fighting men of Batu's tribe had sworn allegiance to the king of
Ershi; in partial return for wheat and millet from Ferghana's fields, they were bound to come to the city's aid in time of attack. I straightened and scowled at Batu as he crossed his arms over the wiry strength of his chest and scowled in return.

‘Please, no eagles!' I said, for I could be stubborn too; city neighbours thought I was a sweet girl only because I was too shy to speak. Batu and the horses knew better; they knew that my shyness was like the soft murmur of a stream that flows over a hard boulder beneath the surface.

‘No eagles!' Batu agreed, still scowling. ‘Now
go
, RIDE! I'll join you when I can!'